Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 9th December 2020

102 88 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Ancestral Head 1964 Oil on canvas, 41 x 33cm (16 x 13”) Signed, inscribed and dated 1964 on stretcher verso Provenance: With the Dawson Gallery, Dublin where purchased, thence by descent. € 15,000 - 20,000 In 1964, Louis le Brocquy made a fortuitous visit to the ethnographic Musée de l’Homme in Paris. At the time, he felt he was at an impasse, artistically. Despite all that he had achieved in over two decades of fruitful labour, he did not know how to move forwards. Dissatisfied with his work, he had destroyed almost everything he’d done the previous year. At the mu- seum he encountered decorated Polynesian skulls. These prized ancestral relics, augment- ed with clay and painted, symbolically contain the spirits of the departed. In his Presences series, Le Brocquy had successfully explored ways of visualising the individual human being as a physical entity emerging from an enveloping white matrix. As an adjunct to this series, in 1956, he’d made a tiny but important painting, Caroline , a portrait head of a friend’s daughter, treated in a similar way to the presences. Now he was inspired to return to the idea of encapsulating an individual in the form of an image of the head alone, using paint not to capture a likeness as such but to excavate the essence of a person. In time he visited Entremont in southern France and learned of the Celtic head cult, further crystalising his vision of “the image of the head as a kind of magic box that holds the spirit prisoner.” By then he had made several head paintings that laid the groundwork for decades of work. They include Ancestral Heads , evocations of his own family ancestry and the Wolfe Tone or Irish Martyr heads and some studies of James Joyce – a subject he was to return to in depth over a decade later, together with other great literary figures. He described the works as reconstructions, alluding to the almost archaeological nature of the process as he attempted to get inside the head of a subject, so to speak, and capture a sense of the spirit within. This Ancestral Head , made during a period of hectic creativity, is clearly related to the Joyce reconstructions and perhaps to the familial ancestors. A pre-eminent figure in 20th century Irish art, le Brocquy was originally destined for a career in the family’s oil refinery business and studied chemistry. Encouraged by his mother, Sybil le Brocquy, who was active and influential in cultural circles, he decided to pursue his love of painting and set off to study works in the great European galleries. A painter of great facility and impeccable judgment, he was a central figure in modernist developments in Ireland. His reputation flourished both at home and abroad when he moved first to London and later, following his marriage to Anne Madden, to France, where they lived and worked for about 20 years. He is celebrated for significant bodies of work made at every stage of his career and his paintings are including in numerous private and public collections. Aiden Dunne, November 2020